New York - AH200/HY200/MS222 - Art in Context
New York - Block 6, 2027 - Art in Context
BLOCK 6 - SPRING 2027
AH200/HY200/MS222: ART IN CONTEXT
New York, New York
What constituted “play” in early modern European culture? Using primary texts and images from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, we’ll ask: How did Renaissance painters and writers depict leisure, games, and fun in daily life? What were the moral, religious, and societal implications of those activities and those stories? What did visual representations of play and games mean for contemporaries in the Renaissance? And what do they mean for us today? The rich collections in New York museums offer a unique opportunity to engage directly with Renaissance visual culture (including paintings, sculpture, metalwork, prints, and tapestries). Within the museum space, we’ll interrogate how the Renaissance is presented to the public, and how elites in the United States framed the European Renaissance as a foundational chapter of an invented narrative of American nationhood. Finally, we’ll engage with the American consumption and manipulation of that heritage in the 20th and 21st centuries – in museums as well as in films, television, Renaissance festivals, and video games. The course draws on interdisciplinary perspectives from history, literature, art, and museum and cultural studies.
Course led by Prof. Rebecca Tucker and Prof. Tip Ragan